Platos Gorgias
SOCRATES: As to the arts generally, they are for the most GORGIAS: You are quite right, Socrates, in your appre-part concerned with doing, and require little or no speaking; hension of my meaning.
in painting, and statuary, and many other arts, the work may proceed in silence; and of such arts I suppose you would say SOCRATES: Well, then, let me now have the rest of my that they do not come within the province of rhetoric.
answer:seeing that rhetoric is one of those arts which works mainly by the use of words, and there are other arts which GORGIAS: You perfectly conceive my meaning, Socrates.
also use words, tell me what is that quality in words with which rhetoric is concerned:Suppose that a person asks SOCRATES: But there are other arts which work wholly me about some of the arts which I was mentioning just now; through the medium of language, and require either no ac-he might say, Socrates, what is arithmetic? and I should tion or very little, as, for example, the arts of arithmetic, of reply to him, as you replied to me, that arithmetic is one of calculation, of geometry, and of playing draughts; in some of those arts which take effect through words. And then he these speech is pretty nearly co-extensive with action, but in would proceed to ask: Words about what? and I should most of them the verbal element is greaterthey depend reply, Words about odd and even numbers, and how many wholly on words for their efficacy and power: and I take your there are of each. And if he asked again: What is the art of meaning to be that rhetoric is an art of this latter sort?
calculation? I should say, That also is one of the arts which is concerned wholly with words. And if he further said, Con-GORGIAS: Exactly.
cerned with what? I should say, like the clerks in the assembly, as aforesaid of arithmetic, but with a difference, SOCRATES: And yet I do not believe that you really mean the difference being that the art of calculation considers to call any of these arts rhetoric; although the precise ex-not only the quantities of odd and even numbers, but also pression which you used was, that rhetoric is an art which their numerical relations to themselves and to one another.
works and takes effect only through the medium of dis-And suppose, again, I were to say that astronomy is only course; and an adversary who wished to be captious might wordshe would ask, Words about what, Socrates? and I say, And so, Gorgias, you call arithmetic rhetoric. But I should answer, that astronomy tells us about the motions do not think that you really call arithmetic rhetoric any more of the stars and sun and moon, and their relative swiftness.
than geometry would be so called by you.